Monday, March 02, 2009

Azure (meaning the color of a cloudless sky) is Microsoft's new cloud computing platform. Table Storage is the data storage API of Azure. It "offers structured storage in the form of tables. The Table Storage API is a REST API for working with tables and the data that they contain".

Here are two recent blog entries showing how to use Table Storage with / from IronPython:

In an earlier installment of the elmcity+azure series, I created an event logger for my Azure service based on SQL Data Services (SDS). The general strategy for that exercise was as follows:

Make a thin wrapper around the REST interface to the query service

Use the available query syntax to produce raw results

Capture the results in generic data structures

Refine the raw results using a dynamic language

Now I’ve repeated that exercise for Azure’s native table storage engine, which is more akin to Amazon’s SimpleDB and Google’s BigTable than to SDS. Over on GitHub I’ve posted the C# interface library, the corresponding tests, and the IronPython wrapper which I’m using in the interactive transcript shown below.

This entry is by Tarn Barford. He writes some C# helpers and demonstrates using them from IronPython:

My goal was to write a bit of scaffolding to make using the storage service fun and easy from in IronPython. The Windows Azure SDK comes with a library in the samples which does the low level work interfacing with the API and provides some nice classes to work with. There are methods to generate table schemas by reflecting on model classes and another sample implements all the standard .NET providers.

I was hoping to write all the scaffolding and the model classes in IronPython but, in the first of a series of set backs, I found the development storage server behaves differently than the cloud. For some reason you need to create tables on the development storage server using a command line tool, passing your model assemblies as arguments. Apparently this will be fixed soon, but trying to stay focused I decided I'd have to write my models in C# for now.

Once I had an assembly with some models I could use the DevTableGen.exe command line tool that comes with the Azure SDK to create tables on my development storage server.